Uncontrolled Evolution

Official *Wasteland Online* Website. [Beta 0.4 Update!] [Update Details: 1. Maritime Trade System Implemented: The trade route to Sunset Province is now open. Players can trade with NPCs in the Lion Kingdom and invest in local farms or other industries. In addition, more tradeable regions have been unlocked; players are encouraged to explore them in-game. 2. A new training point for the "Cloud Dragonfly" ornithopter has been added to the Enterprise Aviation Base north of Xizhou City. Players can pay 500,000 silver coins via VM for self-funded training. Those with an aircraft piloting skill proficiency of 7 or higher and contribution points qualifying them as Senior Citizens can apply for publicly funded training. 3. As the Alliance's mobile stronghold, the Heart of Steel can provide save services, though it does not guarantee it will drop anchor at locations players desire. 4. Shelter 404 floors unlocked down to Floor B6. Floor B5 is currently undergoing repairs, so stay tuned. 5. Closed beta player account cap increased from 8,000 to 12,000! 6. Minor bug fixes. 7. ... ] Luo Yu: "Holy crap?!" Lightning King Professor Yang: "What's wrong with you now?" Luo Yu: "It moved!!!" Feng Qing: "0.0?" Gui Gui: "What?" Luo Yu: "My respawn countdown started ticking again! Hahahaha! Thanks, Brother Guang! Mwah!" Ye Ao Nai Wo He: "Hilarious. Keep acting, you guys actually make it look pretty convincing. Lord Ye will just quietly sit back and watch you posers flex." Elaina: "Jealousy really does cause plasmolysis. (funny)" Elven King Fugui: "+1 (funny)" ... At the same time. Shelter 404. A squad of fully armed players stood at the entrance to Floor B6. It was now confirmed that the entire Floor B6 was a laboratory—specifically, a biological lab dedicated to researching mutant slime mold. All signs indicated that the research specimens here most likely dated back to the early Wasteland Era, or even further back to the Three-Year War. From that fragmentary audio recording, it was abundantly clear that the escaped specimen was no pushover—in fact, it was extremely dangerous. Otherwise, it wouldn't have wiped out all the floor's guards and forced the first-generation Administrator to administer "shock therapy" to the entire level. Chu Guang certainly wasn't going to facecheck the bushes, especially when he knew full well there were landmines hidden inside. Besides, he had a group of little players who weren't afraid of dying, so why on earth would he do something so dangerous himself? At the exact moment the Beta 0.4 update went live, the players Chu Guang had selected to come down here received an identical quest pop-up on their forearm VMs. [Quest: Reclaim Shelter 404 Floor B6] [Description: A specimen stored on Floor B6 of Shelter 404 broke containment, causing the floor to become infected with slime mold.] [Objectives: 1. Search for any potential progenitor/broodmother. 2. Proceed to the laboratory to recover experimental logs. 3. Proceed to the server room to retrieve unuploaded data.] Watching the light-blue icon pulse on his VM screen, confirming the quest they had just received from the Administrator, Ye Shi's eyes sparkled with excitement. "Awesome! Didn't expect to land such a massive gig back on the home front!" Sunset Province was the home turf of the Storm Corps and Skeleton Corps. The Burning Corps had fewer members and specialized in urban warfare rather than open plains, so they had largely played a sideline role throughout the entire war, feeling completely left out. After spectating on the official forum for so long, he had finally caught an opportunity to flex. Jieyan, who was following Kuang Feng, stared at his VM screen and had a sudden brainwave. "Do you think the out-of-control specimen could be Luo Yu?" Kuang Feng's impassive face cracked into a smothered smirk as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. "...Possible, unless there's a time machine here that sent him back a hundred years." Jieyan: "Holy crap! There's a time machine here?!" Kuang Feng: "...Can you let someone finish their sentence for once?" Looking at the mold plaques creeping across the walls, Ye Shi couldn't help but click his tongue. "Sweet mother of God... It's been cut off from water, power, and air for so long, and the damn thing can still move!" Kuang Feng surveyed their surroundings and pondered for a moment. "Yeah, and it even crippled most of the cameras and 85 percent of the electronic equipment in this area... The situation here might be more complicated than we thought." "Complicated or not, just get it done!" Lao Bai, clad in OD-10 "Dragoon" power armor, grinned. He raised an index finger to lock his helmet's visor into place, then chambered a round into his assault rifle. He then barked into the comm channel: "The quest has updated on our VMs. Our objective is to reclaim the fallen Floor B6 area!" "Squad A, with me: search for the enemy's 'crystal' and inject the inhibitor for containment. Squad B, follow Ye Shi to the sample repository to look for experimental logs. Squad C, follow Kuang Feng to the server room and secure the hard drives storing the experimental data and documents according to the quest prompts." "Once the objectives are completed, we regroup at the entrance to the buffer chamber. Keep your signals clear at all times—the Administrator is watching us!" "Move out!" The players split smoothly into three squads and advanced cautiously, scanning ahead. As one of the top elite squads on the entire server, the Burning Corps was naturally in its element handling special operations like this. Nobody was better at close-quarters indoor combat than them. Meanwhile, Chu Guang sat in the viewing room on Floor B4, peering through the body cameras carried by the players to venture deep into the out-of-control biological laboratory alongside them. Beside him, Yin Fang and Heya had also been brought in as "technical advisors" for this military operation, ready to offer professional advice whenever necessary. Ever since the operation began, however, Heya's attention had been utterly captivated by the massive scale and state-of-the-art facilities of this laboratory. Her gaze went far beyond simple admiration—it bordered on envy, perhaps even outright jealousy. "I don't understand! Just how much budget did you people have?! Your shelter is numbered after ours, so why... why do you have so many good things?" Facing that bitter glare, Chu Guang had no clue how to answer and simply chose to ignore her. What the hell was the point of asking him about stuff from before the Wasteland Era? If you want to know, go ask the first-generation Administrator! Yin Fang, his eyes fixed on the computer screen with his focus elsewhere, stroked his chin and offered the first half-baked suggestion of the operation. "...Actually, I'd recommend deploying a squad of synthetics. That way, even if something goes wrong, it won't provide the organisms down there with additional organic matter." Chu Guang replied casually, "I trust my soldiers. They're much better to use than synthetics." Heya and Yin Fang both shot Chu Guang a startled look, especially at the word "use." Chu Guang, however, maintained an indifferent expression, his gaze glued to the video feed on the screen. In the brief span of their idle chatter, Squad A, led by Lao Bai, had already engaged the enemy. Interestingly, the slime mold fruiting bodies they encountered were completely different from those in Qingquan City. Emaciated, humanoid fruiting bodies stumbled around like the walking dead in a zombie movie. Yet unlike typical "zombies," these gnawer-like fruiting bodies didn't cluster in hordes. Instead, they hid silently in corridor corners or crouched behind overturned display cases. Some even lay on the floor playing dead. Only when someone approached would they reawaken and launch a sudden ambush, turning what was supposed to be a cheerful RPG into a horror game. The advance of Squad A and Squad C slowed down noticeably. In contrast, Squad B, led by Ye Shi, relied on his formidable Perception to anticipate hidden dangers time and again, quickly pushing into the area where the experimental logs were stored. Although surprise attacks from the fruiting bodies came in wave after wave, the players suffered neither casualties nor injuries. Those gaunt walking corpses could at most give the players a jump scare. No matter how light the protection of the Light Cavalry exoskeleton was, it wouldn't be smashed by arms as thin as matchsticks or pierced by a few rotten teeth. To say nothing of power armor. Before warship-grade alloy steel, frail flesh and blood crumpled like paper. Lao Bai didn't even bother firing. He simply unslung the mace mounted on his armor and crushed the charging corpses to pulpy bits with a couple of heavy slams. In such close-quarters combat, firing recklessly carried the risk of ricochets, and a reflexive trigger squeeze could easily result in friendly fire; cold steel proved far handier by comparison. "It's likely that during the prolonged lockdown, the slime mold in this area lacked sufficient nutrients to cultivate stronger fruiting bodies. Add to that the absence of prey to hunt... and these fruiting bodies were produced purely for scavenging and energy conservation," Heya muttered, stroking her chin in deep thought. Having received Chu Guang's promise that "Floor B6 would be handed over for her use," her focus was finally on the slime mold within the level. Chu Guang pondered for a moment and said, "A scarcity of organic matter prevents the slime mold here from secreting massive amounts of spores... Hiss, why do I feel like this is just like Strain No. 7 in Lost Valley?" Yin Fang nodded as well. "The only difference lies in the degree of scarcity... Lost Valley was a wasteland, whereas this place is like a space station cut off from supplies." Chu Guang suddenly turned to Heya. "Wait. Earlier, you said... slime molds that evolved in different environments are incompatible and won't exchange genetic information with one another. But what if they both evolved in resource-depleted environments? In other words, can slime molds with similar evolutionary environments be compatible?" He knew his question was clumsily phrased. He wasn't a professional biologist, after all, so his terminology was layman-grade, and the idea that had just popped into his mind was still quite abstract. Heya thought it over carefully before answering, "In the scenario you described, interspecific competition and genetic exchange would likely occur at the same time... or to put it bluntly, predation and assimilation." Chu Guang: "Predation?" "Yes," Heya nodded. "It's just a hypothesis, but if A and B are different strains that evolved in resource-scarce environments, then between A and B, there will inevitably be segments of genetic material that the other finds desirable... When one devours the other, those genetic segments will be actively or passively inherited." "A slime mold's genetic information isn't a single string of code; it's more like a 'library' made up of countless lines of code." "When cultivating fruiting bodies, the broodmother or progenitor selects the necessary genetic code from this library to fashion the organisms it needs. Even if gnawers and Tyrants don't even share the same chromosome count, as long as they are born from the same broodmother, they still belong to the same collective. In that sense, they aren't truly distinct individuals, but more like organs belonging to a single, colossal organism... That is what I meant by a hive society." "To truly understand this organism, one must acquire its progenitor and extract the primordial gene pool used to synthesize fruiting bodies. That is the root of all fruiting bodies, and the blueprint for every evolved organism." Just as Heya was explaining this to Chu Guang, the players pushing deep into Floor B6 finally ran into real trouble. A shrill roar suddenly rolled down from the end of the corridor. A grayish-black suit of power armor stood at the corridor's far end. Burly and imposing, it was not in the least inferior to the "Dragoon" power armor—in fact, it was slightly larger in frame. Judging by its faded paint scheme, it appeared to be a police-issue model. The moment Lao Bai laid eyes on that armor, warning bells rang in his mind. He hurled the mace with all his might, sending it hurtling like a meteor toward the power armor's faceplate. With the dual bonus of his Strength stat and the armor's servomotors, even a tank in its path would have had a deep dent hammered into it. Yet the power armor merely swept its arm aside and swatted the flying mace away. Without a moment's pause, the power armor bent its knees slightly and launched itself forward like a cannonball. Lao Bai raised his rifle and emptied an entire magazine, but failed to leave even a scratch on the armor. Seeing that 7mm rounds couldn't breach its defenses, Lao Bai simply tossed the rifle aside and drew the thermal fusion cutting axe hanging at his waist. Yet— The evolved organism was still one step faster. Before he could raise the axe, the creature's pauldron collided intimately with his breastplate. *CLANG—!* The two metal behemoths slammed into each other, the deafening screech of colliding armor echoing down the corridor. Locked in such tight quarters, fire support was impossible; the three squadmates behind could only watch the clash of titans unfold. His right arm pinned hard by the evolved organism's left arm, Lao Bai nearly lost his footing, but managed to stabilize himself. Eyeing the seam along the side of the helmet, he drew his combat knife in a reverse grip with his left hand and thrust it viciously forward! The gust kicked up by his arm practically blew into the helmet, yet the descending blade was caught mid-stroke by the evolved organism's other arm. The gleaming knife and axe blade hung suspended over the helmet, unable to advance a fraction of an inch. Beneath the battered plating, repulsive chunks of flesh writhed, unspent nuclear power converted by the slime mold into raw, primal force. Through the fissures in the damaged armor, Lao Bai caught a faint glimpse of a scarlet glow. It was the gaze of a predator. Behind the instincts of slaughter and bloodlust burned an appetite far more chilling than hatred. It was starving... With both arms locked, Lao Bai felt the strain. Gritting his teeth and pressing down with every ounce of strength he could muster, he was secretly astonished. This thing— Was even tougher to deal with than a Decayed Knight! "Fuck!" Blood surged in his chest! Lao Bai roared and activated his Strength-type talent. His physical output instantly doubled, forcing the axe and knife an inch downward against the resistance. Mechanical components in both suits of power armor creaked under the immense stress. The evolved organism occupying the armor was driven back half a step, a frenzied, piercing screech venting from the seams of its plates. Seizing the opening as it stumbled back, Lao Bai lashed out with a vicious kick straight to its knee. Under the terrifying burst of augmented strength, the outward-bending joint buckled backward with a sickening crunch. Thrown off balance, the evolved organism dropped to one side. Lao Bai immediately followed through, driving his knife through its skull and giving it a violent twist. To his shock, the creature acted as if its brain hadn't even been punctured. Understanding dawned on Lao Bai instantly. Its central nervous system wasn't in its head! Hell, it might not even have one! "Create some distance!" Ye Shi's voice suddenly crackled over the comm channel. Elated, Lao Bai planted another heavy kick against the creature's chest before it could regain its footing, sending it staggering backward. A thick, rusted alloy arm clawed against the wall, its rigid fingers screeching across the surface with ear-grating friction. The instant the two suits of power armor separated, Ye Shi—prone at the far end of the corridor with his "Viper" Gauss rifle deployed—locked his aim and squeezed the trigger. *BANG—!* An arc of electric light flashed in an instant. The projectile screaming from the barrel accelerated to Mach 4.5, a thunderous sonic boom resounding through the corridor. The strike came from behind! Its target was the power armor's most vulnerable section. The evolved organism had no time to react. The poorly maintained armor's integrity was already critically degraded; against the devastating armor-piercing force of the electromagnetic rifle, it was punched clean through in an instant. As the kinetic impact hurled the creature stumbling forward, Lao Bai seized the opening, swung the thermal fusion cutting axe, and brought it crashing down. A searing red glow flared. A jet of superheated plasma sliced through the armor on the evolved organism's left shoulder, flooding through the breach to incinerate the soft tissue within into cinders. The crimson glow finally faded from its visor, and the creature collapsed heavily to its knees, moving no more. Holstering his rifle, Ye Shi walked up, took a look at the downed creature, and whistled. "Holy crap... slime molds can pilot power armor now?!" Unlike a Decayed Knight, this suit's nuclear battery was clearly still operational, even if most of the internal electronics were ruined. "They can even pilot Titans, so why not power armor...?" Lao Bai walked over, clapped him on the shoulder, and chuckled. "Nice shooting! Did you wrap up your side?" Ye Shi grinned. "Done and dusted... The progenitor wasn't in the lab. That place was totally empty. On the Administrator's orders, we grabbed the experimental logs, and then he told us to loop around to this corridor to back you guys up... What about you?" Lao Bai shook his head. "Didn't find it... We've searched most of the area, and we haven't seen hide nor hair of the progenitor." Ye Shi blinked. "Could it be with Kuang Feng?" Almost the moment the words left his mouth, a notification popped up on the players' VMs. Reading the text, Ye Shi's face morphed into horror. "Holy crap... my jinx mouth actually struck gold!" Lao Bai wasted no time, retrieving his rifle and the mace he had hurled earlier from the floor. "Move! Let's back him up!" ... Floor B6. Biological Laboratory Server Room. Rows of computer chassis lined along metal racks were completely submerged in dark red slime mold. Across the hundreds of square meters of the room, writhing masses of mold stretched as far as the eye could see. The entire server room seemed to have turned into an ocean of slime mold, leaving not a single spot to step on below the steps of the main entrance! Translucent, egg-shaped fleshy membranes floated atop this crimson sea like silk cocoons, pulsing restlessly. "It" seemed to have just awakened, thoroughly invigorated by the sudden revival of its "climate" and the long-awaited arrival of prey before its eyes! Gazing at the scene, Kuang Feng and his squadmates wore expressions of utter bewilderment. Swallowing hard, Jieyan turned to the smartest guy in the squad. "How... how are we supposed to recover that?" Kuang Feng shook his head grimly. "No idea..." The server racks were completely submerged in a sea of slime mold, every chassis glued fast. Never mind finding the hard drive hidden inside one of them—even approaching those rows of racks posed an insurmountable challenge. Stepping across this slime mold... felt like an invitation to disaster. Kuang Feng thought for a moment before calmly analyzing, "In any case, we have to clear out the slime mold here first... This probably isn't an ordinary slime mold nest; it might very well be a miniature broodmother." The three players behind him, including Jieyan, whispered among themselves: "If I read the quest right, it wants us to recover this thing..." "Recover it? The damn thing's turned into a swimming pool... Never mind how much inhibitor we'd need to drug it into submission—how are we supposed to drag it out of this room?" "I'm tired. Just blow it up." "Blowing it up is out of the question... The experimental data we need to recover is still on a hard drive inside one of those chassis." The players tasked with the mission were stuck in a dilemma. Watching from the viewing room, Chu Guang faced the exact same problem. Eliminating the broodmother in there was simple enough: authorize the players to bring heavy ordnance down to Floor B6, shove a 155mm shell inside, and detonate it manually. If one wasn't enough, use two. In an enclosed environment, the shockwave alone from a heavy high-explosive shell would be enough to pulverize the room's organisms several times over. The trouble, however, lay in the data stored within those computer chassis... With the transmission lines severed, the data couldn't be uploaded remotely to the shelter's servers; the hard drives had to be retrieved by hand. Heavy weapons were off the table, and tactics like pouring gasoline or acid were unlikely to work either. Just then, a thought struck Yin Fang. "What if we fight poison with poison?" Chu Guang blinked. "Fight poison with poison?" Yin Fang nodded excitedly, gesturing with his index finger as he pitched his stroke of genius. "For example... bring in another progenitor from outside! We use the natural incompatibility between different slime mold populations and let progenitor fight progenitor!" Chu Guang was momentarily taken aback, his eyes lighting up. *Good grief, setting tigers against wolves!* *That's... surprisingly brilliant.* Just as he was about to voice his approval, however, Heya, standing aside with her arms crossed, let out a sigh. "And where do you plan on getting a progenitor? The closest one to us is in the city center." Yin Fang stared blankly. "Aren't the nests that produce gnawers progenitors?" "Those things are called incubation chambers!" Heya retorted. "They don't store the complete gene pool of the population. At best, they count as specialized organs for producing a few specific varieties and acting as signal repeaters! Cut off from the spore coverage of a progenitor or broodmother, they wither away in no time. Dragging one of those in there would just be feeding fertilizer to the slime mold inside." At this point, Heya, still hung up on the Oasis No. 7 ruins, added, "Still, it isn't an entirely terrible idea. I heard that Lost Valley place seems to harbor a relatively benign mutant slime mold strain... If we could secure a progenitor from there, we might not only solve the slime mold problem on Floor B6, but also gain a batch of benign cultures!" The idea was indeed solid. It would be even better if that Titan weren't there. A monster that even a nuclear warhead couldn't kill—how the hell was he supposed to fight it?! Feigning blindness to the excited glint in her eyes, Chu Guang cleared his throat lightly and turned to Yin Fang. "Heya is right... this approach needs further discussion." Heya: "Uh, what I actually meant was—" Chu Guang cut her off, continuing, "In short, before we decide on a method to deal with the slime mold down there, we should examine the experimental logs first and see whether the research findings are even worth taking such a massive risk." With that, Chu Guang turned to Xiao Qi, who was sitting on the office desk, and commanded, "Xiao Qi, order the team on Floor B6 to pull back with the experimental logs." Placing her right fist over her chest, Xiao Qi gave a playful reply. "Roger that!" ... The quest was half completed. Chu Guang, true to form, only dispensed half of the players' rewards. Plugging the memory card containing the experimental logs into a holographic computer pen, a light-blue holographic projection promptly appeared in the center of the viewing room. First came a holographic video recording. In the footage stood an unfamiliar man, talking to someone off-camera. He wore a shelter uniform, and the badge on his chest bore the alphanumeric code [G-13], presumably his designation. Judging by the camera angle, neither he nor the person he was speaking with had realized they were being secretly recorded. "...This planet has already been contaminated. In other words, it's beyond saving." "This is an extinction method far more cruel than a neutron sweep. The slime molds engineered to destroy us are better suited to our home than we are. They won't kill us outright; instead, they will grow rampantly wherever we live, dogging our footsteps and choking out our living space. Our descendants will have no choice but to abandon the cities and migrate to the outskirts, or stay behind and become their fertilizer!" "The meager legacy we leave our children will dry up one day. As production capacities decline, this planet will no longer possess the soil to support advanced social structures. Our civilization will regress in reverse: first declining into feudal society, then into a slave society, and finally into primitive tribes... until we are reduced entirely to beasts, ultimately replaced by something even more savage." "Yes, our black boxes are still running, but what about a thousand years from now? Ten thousand years from now? Once the trend takes shape, reversing it will be nearly impossible. If we cannot resolve these problems now, the future will only be bleaker... When that day comes, never mind specialized biology labs—our descendants might not even be able to build a microscope, so how will they study those things?" "This is no idle alarmism. In fact, the regression of civilization began before winter even ended. Look at that community we've been monitoring—what are they calling themselves now, 'Blood Hand' or whatever garbage... I'd bet anything that even if they survive this winter, those people won't be any smarter than monkeys!" "The seeds of savagery have already infected their brains. They will become engines of chaos, plundering the wealth of civilized folk through the crudest methods like ancient nomads. At the very least, not a single survivor in these suburbs will escape their clutches." "I don't understand why the Professor tolerated that guard risking the shelter's location to aid those hopeless fools with precious radio equipment... Whatever his motives, that guard committed suicide. His plan undeniably failed, and I refuse to place my chips on a loser!" "But he is the Administrator. Do you have a better idea?" The person standing opposite Researcher G-13 finally spoke, breaking Researcher G-13's monologue. Perhaps seeing the interest in the other person's face, Researcher G-13 continued with growing animation. "Of course!" "The slime mold is highly adaptable, but we will be stronger. It won't be us who get devoured—it will be them!" The other person hesitated before asking, "And how do you plan to achieve that?" "Synthesize a progenitor!" Researcher G-13 gave an emphatic answer, his concept bearing an uncanny resemblance to the half-baked brainstorm Yin Fang had just proposed. "We can cultivate mature somatic cells into embryonic stem cells, so we can certainly reverse-engineer mature fruiting bodies back into a broodmother!" "We will recompile the broodmother's gene library, reshaping them under our guidance into whatever form we desire!" His eyes burned with unbridled ambition. Researcher G-13 paused on each syllable, declaring: "They will replace the surface slime mold!" "And we... will control evolution!"